Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Friday, January 25, 2008

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Monday, January 14, 2008

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.

"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.

However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.

"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.

The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.

"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.

Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.

... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”

That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.

And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.

However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

[...]

The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.

In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.

There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.